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I have learned more through my experience with inner-city teens than I could ever hope to learn from a university. It is time for the elite minority to move out of the limits of their class privilege and share their resources.

Kim Nicolini

Issue #26, May 1996

I like to paint, and I like to write poems. I like to take
materials and words and make something new out of them, to create
a form outside of myself that represents myself and my view of
the world. Making things has always been part of my life. I've
done this since I can remember. When people find out I do this
or when people come to my house and see my paintings, they ask, "Are you an artist?" I freeze. I hate answering that
question. ARTIST — the very word causes me anxiety, gives me a
stomach ache, makes me fidget. "No, I just like to make
things," I usually reply.

Why am I so uncomfortable calling myself an artist? Because
I don't feel like the word "artist" belongs to me, because
the word "artist" implies membership in a social class
to which I do not feel I belong or can belong. The terms "artist" and "art" do not simply describe those who make and that which is made; they are markers of cultural hierarchy, representations of class. The concepts of the artist and art do not belong to everyday people. They belong to the material and cultural elite
who deny access to those who do not possess the necessary cultural
and material capital to participate in the arena of art.

In socially sanctified circles, being an artist implies that
you have gone through the prescribed institutional "system"
of art. This is especially obvious in the case of visual artists:
you've been to college and art school; you've been trained by
official artists; you've worked your way into gallery shows and
sold your work to collectors; and if you have the right connections, maybe some day you'll have a retrospective at a museum and be
canonized. Within systems of power, being an artist means that
you move with other artists, that you are part of the elite art
community. The art community is rarely part of the everyday people
community, and the everyday people community is rarely part of
the art community. I inhabit the gray area in between. I work
in the everyday world, and I also like to create things and express
myself in art and writing. But, I do not call myself an artist.
I make things.

I shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable calling myself an artist
though. People are naturally drawn to what we call "art".
We possess the powers to imagine, reflect and feel that inspire
the making and appreciating of art. So why is it relegated to
a limited arena owned and operated by an elite few? Because
imagination and reflection are perceived as dangerous to systems
of power and to a social system that divides people into classes.
People are discouraged from feeling, reflecting, and questioning
because doing so may lead them to question their position on the
social map, to question the authority of those in power, and to
cross their class boundaries. It is important for power structures
as they exist today to keep art away from the majority.

I studied at UC Berkeley in the English Department for my
junior and senior years of college. I transferred there on a
full scholarship from a community college, never having been to
high school. The reason I became an English major was corny, romantic, and certainly would be frowned upon by most members
of the intellectual elite: I felt that literature spoke to me.
Before I attended community college, I had never been exposed
to literature. But when I did read "serious" literature
for the first time, I was incredibly moved by socially conscious
writing that explored and exposed the everyday tragedies that
occur in our social and economic systems. Dreiser, Baldwin, Plath
and loads of other writers dealing with class, race, gender, and economic issues made me realize that my situation, my family's
struggles, were not just mine, but were indicative of an entire
system that oppresses the many and caters to the few. But as
powerful an effect as reading literature had on me, I still feel
embarrassed for writing this because that's what my education
at Berkeley taught me — to be embarrassed by sincere thoughts.
During my entire two-year stay at Berkeley, only two professors
were supportive of my personal approach to literature. Passionate
and personal responses to novels and poems were not acceptable.
Many professors and readers trivialized my points of view, mocked
and belittled me. Why? Because my ideas were not hidden in the
language of a privileged theoretical discourse. They were just
too accessible.

Not only are personal and passionate responses discouraged
in academic circles, they are also discouraged in everyday life.
Enlightenment, understanding, and personal reflection are dangerous
to systems of power. Because of those systems, these basic human
elements have been displaced onto commodity objects rather than
their own creative works or the appreciation of works created
by others. Art has been taken away from the people and replaced
with commodity culture. Ironically, these types of questions about
art and class never occurred to me prior to attending UC Berkeley.
My two years at Berkeley exposed me to class differences and
systems of exclusion to which I had never been exposed while simultaneously providing me with the tools to critique those very systems. I had always used art and writing as a means to express myself, my history, and my reactions to the social constructs that affected
me. Art gave me a concrete release for my abstract experience
and feelings. Although my education at Berkeley should have discouraged
me from this approach to art, when I graduated from Berkeley, I combined my initial relationship to art, my new awareness of
class and elitism, and my new tools for critique, and worked to
bring art to those people usually excluded from its elite circle.

I used my experience to bring the power of art to inner-city
teens, to help them access the arts and use them to better understand
themselves and their condition in the same way I did as a former
inner-city teen who was able to move out of that environment.
I have been teaching art and poetry to inner-city kids in one
form or another since I graduated from Berkeley in 1988. My first
job was at a 52 bed residential rehabilitation facility for teens
on probation. The majority of these teens grew up in gangs.
About half were from Mexican gangs in California's Central Valley.
Their parents were non-native speakers, and many were dead or
in prison. Other parents worked picking fruit and vegetables
in the fields of the Central Valley. Many others were African
American gang teens (Crips and Bloods) from San Francisco and
Oakland. They had spent their entire lives in the housing projects
and on the streets. Many of their parents were dead or in prison.
None of these kids possessed cultural capital. None of these
kids even knew anything called "theory" existed. In
fact, most of these kids did not even know what "college"
was. But they still produced incredible drawings and paintings
and wrote intensely powerful poems. I never for a moment doubted
their ability to understand, create, and learn. And they never
for a moment let me down.

Beatrice was a fifteen-year-old girl who participated in my
weekly poetry workshops once a week. Her father had shot her
up with heroin and pimped her when she was ten. She had spent
her entire childhood in the sheltered environment of Mexican gangs.
When I got to know her, Beatrice's father was in prison and she
was trying to learn how to function and survive in the world.
Regardless of how many problems she was having the rest of the
week (and they were many), she always came to poetry class and
wrote. She took her writing very seriously. One day she came
up to me and told me she found a poem that she really loved and
wanted to read it to me. She read it:

Spanish Dancer

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture, and watches:
it lies raging on the floor, still blazing up,
and the flames refuse to die — .
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

She read the poem with incredible intensity and passion, slowly
pronouncing each word, never looking at me, her eyes focused entirely
in the place of the poem.

"Have you heard that before?" she asked me.

"No. It's beautiful. Who wrote it?"

"This person." She showed me the book. "I don't
know how to say her name."

The name was Rainer Maria Rilke. She had found the book in
the Bookmobile that visits the community school once a week. She
did not know who Rilke was, did not know that Rilke was German, that he lived in a time before her, that he was a "he."
But she did understand the poem and had a passionate and personal
response to it. I cannot read this poem without thinking about
Beatrice, about her "powerful small feet," her "passionate
flames," of her "rattlesnake" life, without seeing
the image of her father injecting her toe with heroin so her body
would not be scarred. Many scholars would frown upon my relation
to this poem, and they surely would place little value on Beatrice's
interpretation of it. But who says that that Rilke's poem belongs
any less to Beatrice than to some academic?

I use Beatrice and Rilke here to illustrate that art can have
meaning without being filtered through institutionally enforced
modes of analysis and that art can play a very important role
in people's ability to reflect upon and understand their environment
and life. But what provided Beatrice with access to Rilke, a
poet who very few people know about? (Ask your average person
on the street — and not on the street outside campus — if they
know who Rainer Maria Rilke is and how many positive responses
do you think you will get?) Beatrice was able to access this
poem because of the passion and power of its vision and its connection
to her cultural context — the Spanish Dancer. Most importantly, she accessed the poem through a social program — the bookmobile
-a program which is now virtually extinct due to increasing budget
cuts to libraries and other educational resources available to
those who otherwise would not have access to art and literature.
Without the bookmobile, Beatrice would not have found the Rilke
poem, and without the cultural context and passion expressed in
"The Spanish Dancer," she would not have made the personal
connection to the poem that enabled her to understand herself
in a new light.

Many intellectuals tend to argue against the importance of
the social and cultural context of art. Likewise, they argue
against instinctual reaction to art and claim that this human
response neglects to appreciate the art in its pure form. By
discounting "personal" responses to art, this type of
thinking deprives art of its capacity to provoke change. Many
theorists argue that art should stand alone outside historical, social, and cultural context. But subjectivity demystifies art
and provides avenues for understanding. Providing a social and/or
historical context creates access to the art so people can consider
their own condition and reach an understanding of the forces operating
in their life. And understanding provokes action and change.
Depriving art of this capacity feeds right into structures of
power.

In capitalism as we live in it today, people are not just
discouraged from thinking about art; they are also conditioned
not to "make" things or appreciate the abstract realm
of their existence. They are trained to consume, not to create.
Those who are trained to "make" and to "appreciate"
are a very small percentage of those who live and work under present-day
capitalism. One may argue: what about craftspeople, those who
make things through labor? They are rapidly becoming extinct.
Those who make or create things for work are also a very elite
group — engineers, architects, computer designers, graphic designers.
When was the last time you walked down to your local cobbler for
a pair of hand-made shoes? When was the last time a house was
built in your town by a single craftsperson and his team rather
than a large housing developer employing non-union labor? In
present-day capitalism there are those who are allowed to make
and create and those who are trained to work and consume. And
then there are those who have nothing: no cultural capital, no job, no resources to consume.

The cultural hierarchy imposed on art works to strip it of
its ability to educate, inspire, and promote social change. But
we have to remember that this hierarchy is an artificial construction.
Just because art is constrained by class division does not mean
that it lacks the power to effect change if given the opportunity.
Art's real value is its ability to penetrate the sub-conscious, to inspire reflection, and emancipate the imagination and emotions, all things which have no monetary value. The appreciation of
art does not require economic and cultural capital. Clothed in
the trappings of intellectualism and class, art is deprived of
its very universality and its ability to reach all people. But
these trappings cannot strip art of its ability to inspire or
transcend social boundaries. If people are provided with access
to art, art speaks to the people.

When I worked at the rehab center for teens, I brought the
kids to all the art exhibits that came to the Bay Area regardless
of the content. We saw graffiti artists at the Mexican Museum
and multi-media artists at the Modern Art Museum. One weekend, I brought them to see the Surrealism exhibit at the UC Berkeley
Art Museum. The teens had never heard of Surrealism before. They
had no idea what it was or what it meant, and they certainly had
no knowledge of psychoanalytic theory or any other theory that
would provide them more access to the art's meaning. When we
got to the museum, they all just stared at the paintings and sculpture
with curiosity. Their usual reaction when we first got to a museum
or gallery was: "That's fucking weird," or they would
laugh, or they would have really bizarre personal reactions to
the art. But then they would always ask me what it meant. In
the case of the Surrealism exhibit, I very simply told them about
the rupture that occurred during World War I and World War II, when things fell apart and a great violence and hatred spread
throughout Europe. They could understand that. They had been
living in their own wars. That brief explanation of a historical
context was all it took for the teens to become completely emerged
in the art. Suddenly, they understood and felt it. Each teen
was drawn to a different piece as a testimony of her or his own
history, experience, and emotions: suddenly the art belonged
to them.

This response to art may seem unsophisticated and base, but
sophistication is not the issue here. Impact is the issue. By
being able to access the art, these teens were able to access
themselves, a seemingly simple thing that many people are never
able to do. Institutionalized elitism plays a significant role
in the devaluation of the human intuitive response to art and
of art's ability to teach through catharsis and reflection. While
many intellectuals and academics consciously and aggressively
defend the elite status of art and argue for its high placement
in the cultural hierarchy, others have adopted theory, a heavily
encoded form of intellectual analysis, as a tool to look into
art and analyze its implications, messages, and social significance.
Academics use theory as a tool to communicate complex ideas about
the abstract social, political, and cultural implications of art, literature, and film. Frequently, academic theory informs the
creation of contemporary art and is seen as politically progressive
and potentially revolutionary. But how can a system of thought
and analysis and the art it inspires be revolutionary if its vocabulary
is only accessible to a very limited and elite few? Must one
possess the knowledge of institutionally sanctified "theory"
to understand art's meaning? No. Theory merely puts into words
the intuitive sense which most people already possess. But most
people do not have the luxury or the resources to develop their
own language for the abstract realm of emotion, culture, experience, and history. Theory may help produce a common language for the
privileged few, but it is not a common language for the common
people. It is a language created and controlled by a very small
cultural elite in a closed environment.

Art has become simultaneously trapped by the theoretical dogma
of intellectuals and stigmatized by the academic Left. Because
it is encased by the constrictions imposed on it by the cultural
and material elite who own it, it is frequently dismissed by the
Left as the manifestation of the elite, as a frivolous pursuit
that has no relevance for real-life dilemmas and struggles. But
art actually is relevant to real-life struggles. People have
a natural need to express themselves visually and to have outlets
for their abstract emotions and responses to the world. But with
the way things stand now, art is controlled by the elite to serve
the elite. While the cultural elitists spin intellectual cartwheels
in the arena of art, the material elitists fetishize and consume
it. With the creation of art caught in the trappings of art schools, galleries, and museums and the understanding of art constrained
by institutionalized intellectual dogma, is there a place for
art outside the barriers imposed by class? My experience has taught me that there is and that that place should be a lot larger and much more accessible than it is today.

In a wave of budget cuts to social service programs, I lost
my job at the rehab center four years ago. The center was closed, and those teens are now on their own with no support system.
In my current job, I have worked with nearly 1,000 community service
programs and have watched their budgets disappear and their resources
dry up. Social programs that expose those outside of the privileged
classes to the arts must be revitalized through funding and volunteer
service. I know that art will not solve the world's problems, but it will provide people with an outlet to better understand
their own condition and to express themselves in a new way. Awareness
and understanding are the first step in provoking change. If
they truly want to cultivate social change, those who have access
to the arts and move in the closed circle of universities and
other institutions must move out of that elite environment and
share their cultural resources with those who do not have the
privilege. I have learned more through my experience with inner-city
teens than I could ever hope to learn from a university. It is
time for the elite minority to move out of the limits of their
class privilege and share their resources.

Kim Nicolini is the Executive Director of a small non-profit organization
that provides arts education to disadvantaged people. In her spare
time she makes a lot of things. She would love to hear from you: knicolini@comcast.net